Reminder that it's now been a staggering three weeks since the UT2004stats subdomain outage, with Epic remaining silent and doing nothing about it.

While restoring the UDN knowledge base (now renamed to UDK) might be attributed to the self-serving PR function it conceivably plays for the company, showcasing some of the compounded knowledge on offer to [prospective] clients and therefore the implied pedigree of the Unreal Engine, UT2004stats has arguably only ever constituted a valuable resource to the playing community. As such, its ongoing state of disrepair not only represents an encumbrance to still active UT server staffers and modders seeking insights from daily activity stats in order to improve their content, but, combined with the tepid response and minimal attention to the issue the UT community has managed to muster all this time, IMO it also bears the pragmatic risk of being invoked in future internal considerations at Epic when the conversation inevitably shifts to ditching the rest of the "legacy baggage" and moving on. Top on that list will no doubt be the two Master Servers keeping UT2004 alive.

Act now to lend your voice and raise the necessary ruckus for this to get fixed or, through inaction, you may as well already start coming to terms with your own responsibility in the upcoming end of UT2004 as an ongoing, official concern for Epic. The choice is yours.

So we're now a month into this ut2004stats breakdown situation, and, even as the thread Miauz linked to on Epic's UT forums where people have been pleading for its return has reached its third page now, there still has been no sign of acknowledgement of the problem by Epic, never mind any statement of intention to address it.At this point I think there can be little doubt that the dev has been made aware of the issue, which leaves two possible remaining options: either they can't bring back the UT2004stats server (say, through loss of necessary code or hardware) or they simply don't care to, and I'm beginning to give more stock to the latter version, considering the former would likely see some PR/CM person make a statement of recognition to assuage the anxious community members and avoid the loss of good will.

As I've mused on previously, if leaving the still active UT2004 community without online tracked stats is what Epic really intends, I'd expect that to only be part of a plan to phase out support for the "old anchor" completely. Since I imagine it'd be a really bad look for them to do so in 2019 (i.e. during the game's 15th anniversary), any such plan would probably work better for them if it played out within this year, likely before the holiday period too - no need to sour the mood of older players we'd like to help mass migrate to Fortnite by twisting their arm during the November gaming bonanza, right? In other words, if Epic continues to show no signs of interest in fixing what's already broken soon (say, by end of March), thus lending further credence to these suspicions, there's a good chance they'll try to take out the Master Servers during the (late) summer lull. I do hope I'm proven wrong and just overly suspicious about all this, I really do, but if this turns out to be the way things go down, I'd rather be prepared than just find myself in a state of shock.

For awhile now I've tried to think of countermeasures the community could take to resist, or even repel, the prospect of UT2004's online umbilical cord being completely severed, but beyond each server starting their own stats collection initiative, as some have done in the past by using the existing software for that (TitanTeamFix features such functionality, I believe; Edit: it's UTStatsDB, thanks Miauz) - or, better yet, coming together and agreeing to maintain a joint database as a whole, thus also sharing the technical n' financial burden - there's not much else we could realistically do. Maybe the remaining communities could begin circulating a common Favourites List to help any late newcomers find the existing servers and so compensate for an imminent loss of the MSes too, but either way, some kind of circling of the proverbial wagons will inevitably be necessary for all to survive in the wilderness if or when we're left to our own devices.Raising hell and creating some bad PR optics for Epic online and on social media could probably yield some results, in case anyone's wondering about that, since I expect the wider gaming community does still harbour considerable nostalgic appreciation for UT2004 and the UT franchise up to a certain degree (thanks, UT3...), but IMO it's doubtful many would care to take Epic to task for intentionally rendering the best UT iteration ever made obsolete on purpose, so, all told, I wouldn't expect that on its own to be an effective means of reversing the current trend of apparent Epic disinterest in keeping this game going - and even if it were, it'd come at a cost.

Hate to be closing this on a dour note, but at this point it might be a more prudent use of our time n' effort if we curbed our expectations of Epic's support going forward, and started coming up with ideas of how to ween off it completely for the sake of UT's independent, ongoing survival instead.

A painful lesson I took from very early on in my online gaming "life" some 16 odd years ago was to never (again) render my game- and game community-related speech hostage to the whims of said game's producer; you never know when your views might be deemed inconvenient to the company's agenda and thus find them (or your account in general) subject to censure by their CMs, so you might as well have 'em hosted on a game-adjacent venue, operated by people whose views and priorities will be far more likely to align with yours. Such an arrangement, I've found, offers a more productive, earnest and far less headache-inducing environment in which one can focus on analysis and modding, so I continue to stick by it, while not begrudging anyone taking a different path. Hope that clears it up .

Unfortunately it wouldn't be the first time in the history of the video game : Quake3 arena a 1999 game that have still approximately the same number of players than ut2004 in 2018, and still a big cummunity, money, money ...

I really hope you are wrong, Peg, but I've been considering our possibilities as well.

If you hear anything about Epic planning to shut the Master Server's down, please contact me immediately. I would like to ask Epic if there is any way they would allow the community to take over the Master Servers. The chances are slim that they will agree to give it to someone unaffiliated with Epic, but those things have to cost money and time to maintain, so maybe there is a slim chance I could convince them to let me take over one of them (if that is at all financially doable, I have no idea how much those cost per month).

If that is not possible and the Master Servers are shut down, I imagine our server will die rather rapidly, even if we try to do damage control by maintaining a server list and everyone working together. In that case, I would focus on getting a UT4 server and migrating our community there. That is not something I'm very eager to do, since UT4 isn't ready yet (no Onslaught, so it would give CEONSS a totally different direction), it is not payable for the peeps on slower machines, and it would destroy all the work that we have put into creating unique maps, new edits, custom vehicles and such. But at least that way some of this community might survive.

If i'm honest i don't really understand whats going on here, but would like to share a more positive insight. Now, the slience from EPIC is really only my personal concern, I mean something like a simple tweet at least acknowledging a problem would do, or even if this is part of a upgrade to their stat sytem, a tweet for plans or anything would do.

Pegasus wrote: development of Epic acquiring and integrating Cloudgine

Could this be a transfer of data to their cloud and then introduce in a new domain? Again one thing that discredits this is the complete silence from EPIC. Maybe they cannot disclose anything? Which again doesn't make sense since they brought it. I mean this is only the domain inaccessible(?), doesn't mean the stat server has been deleted or whatever. I don't really know much about this so please excuse any ignorance.

-Nick- wrote:''Epic is unlocking the power of the cloud for its Unreal Engine 4 game-development tools. The company has acquired Cloudgine, a startup that enables Unreal Engine 4 to run certain game computations in the cloud, for an undisclosed amount.Cloudgine’s tech uses cloud servers to enable console, PC, and virtual reality games to render content and interactive objects without worrying about the platform. This is a concept that has shown up in a handful of games, like Titanfall and Forza Motorsport 7. In those online shooters and racing games, the developers offload artificial intelligence routines to the cloud.''

''“Since its inception, Cloudgine’s research and development has been based on Epic’s Unreal Engine 4,” Epic marketing boss Dana Cowley said. “Cloudgine’s cloud computing and online technologies will enhance the UE4 feature set to help developers push the creative and technical limits of games, film, animation and visualization through advances in physics simulation and networking.”

Strange that it only mentions Unreal Engine 4. And these ''online technologies'' spark some thoughts. Thought I'de share that.

Personally i don't care about not being able to look up my stats, means nothing to me, but the useful info gathered by people who it is useful for is concerning. I do have a quesiton, how is the UT2004stats domain dissapearing realeated to the Masterserver which lets us play online? If the master server is releated to a 'problem' or reason as the same as the stat server, wouldn't both be taking down? Which know doubt would be adressed by EPIC beforehand, which makes me think the mastersevers longevity is positive.

About UT99, i don't even know if they have a stats server, has that gone also? What about anyother UTstat servers? other games made by EPIC, their stat servers? About support, maybe they have a timeline, maybe not, but wouldn't UT99 be the first to lose support rather than UT2004?

I would just like to add that without an offical word about something, it could be anything, people othen think the worse and come up with, in this case, logical, educated theories which could be bang on or farther from the truth. It's easy to speculate the worse without much infomation to go on, though i think we should all stay postive on this. Afterall look at all the games which used that awful Gamespy system, when they all shutdown, community managed somehow to get everything back online. BF1942 being the most popular, at least to my concern, still striving dispite losing support.

At the top of @EpicGames' Twitter timeline today is this retweet from @UnrealEngine:

Epic Games Goes Big at #GDC18 - 'State of Unreal' and a day of developer sessions at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, massive expo presence and a comprehensive slate of UE4-focused programming and Fortnite content. - http://epic.gm/4alurhttps://t.co/65n5Zd0TKh

(GDC18 refers to the Game Developers Conference that will be held on March 19-23, 2018 in San Francisco.)

As for the actual "State of Unreal" from a seasoned, on-the-ground perspective? That can only be described as neglect, disrepair, and an ongoing, seemingly willful disinterest to engage in any official capacity with those seeking redress (or even just some basic information) regarding the outages discussed in this thread, but publicly highlighted elsewhere too, that have now plagued the active UT community for 45 days.And that's not even getting into the whole business of stringing along that same community, and exploiting the hopes and wishes of Unreal Tournament enthusiasts the world over - who have been expecting in vain for UT4 to finally materialize for over four years now, let's not forget (reminder that the currently all-time best UT iteration that CEONSS still focuses on took less than a couple of years to develop) - all while milking and encouraging said false hopes so that contributions from numerous indie devs can continue to pour in as part of a cynical scheme to expand UE4's footprint in the market through exposure.

But that's the crux of the mistake when concerning oneself as a player with the "State of Unreal", isn't it? It has nothing to do with an Unreal-related end product and the people who, after a decade of stagnation and underperformance, would welcome the revival of a still favoured franchise (and genre). Epic's "Unreal" efforts nowadays just revolve around pitching to mainstream game devs the next iteration of an amorphous blob of middleware that can push shinier graphics, while cynically (and possibly self-destructively in the long-term) ignoring the concerns of the very people that helped elevate the company to its current prominence over the past 20 years - and who would most likely be the target audience of said game devs' latest efforts, too. The unabashed marketing geared towards that same scorned group about giving up on old UT and taking up Fortnite because that's what we should be caring about now is only the stinking, rotten cherry atop this dried turd of a PR and CM cake.

Not only that, but it seems the server itself had been recording matches normally over the past month and the front-end was all that was malfunctioning. And just as this one reappeared today, the other resource I mentioned disappears...

Forget angry or relieved, this zig-zag kind of progress is just baffling. Anyway, thanks for persisting with Flak and promptly updating, guys - definitely wouldn't have seen this before tomorrow's refresh otherwise.